Johnny Marr on the Smiths, Morrissey and putting politics back in pop | Music | The Guardian Johnny Marr Johnny Marr on the Smiths, Morrissey and putting politics back in pop With the release of his first solo album The Messenger, the former Smiths guitarist talks about finally embracing his old sound, David Cameron and why he and Morrissey don't talk any more Johnny Marr: 'We invented indie as we still know it.' Photograph: Richard Saker Friday 11 January 2013 02.00 EST First published on Friday 11 January 2013 02.00 EST Share on Messenger Close During the December 2010 debate over the raising of student tuition fees in the House of Commons, Labour MP Kerry McCarthy asked a rather surreal question of prime minister David Cameron , who had just gone public with his rather unlikely fandom of leftwing, anti-Conservative, seminal Manchester indie band the Smiths. "As the Smiths are the archetypal student band, if he wins tomorrow night's vote, what songs does he think students will be listening to?" asked the member for Bristol East, to roars from the opposition benches .

"Miserable Lie, I Don't Owe You Anything or Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now ?" Cameron, improbably, responded in kind. "I expect that if I turned up I probably wouldn't get This Charming Man," he quipped, "and if I went with the foreign secretary [William Hague] it would probably be William, It Was Really Nothing ." Reading this on mobile? See the video here "You do wonder," comments Johnny Marr , drily. "What part of the Smiths ethos did he not get?" Few British groups have had the far-reaching impact of the Smiths, and few guitarists are as celebrated as Marr. He was recently named NME's ultimate guitarist (ahead of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page), and even has a Salford University honorary doctorate for "changing the face of British music". "I get a lot of people being very nice to me, even when I don't want them to be," the former Smith chuckles, pointedly. "With one or two exceptions, the people who like the music are always super nice and don't want to bother you.

They just want to tell you how much they love it." He is nothing if not grateful to have been part of a band who "mean so much to so many people", but admits there is a downside: "It can be difficult when it's raining and you're running for the train." His grin widens, but he adds, more seriously. "Or you're trying to move on." Marr has spent 26 years trying to move on from the Smiths, who split in 1987, in which time he's been quite the musical chameleon. What he calls a "searching personality" has taken him from synthesizer pop with Bernard Sumner in Electronic to foreboding rock with Matt Johnson's The The, from folk with Bert Jansch to adult-oriented pop with Crowded House via playing with Bryan Ferry and Chic's Nile Rodgers. He has fronted short-lived Stooges-ish swamp rockers the Healers, enjoyed an unlikely US No 1 album with leftfield indie outfit Modest Mouse and taken his roving guitar gunslinger role to shouty Wakefield indie band the Cribs.

It's hard to see how he could have journeyed further from the trademark "chiming man" guitars he played in the Smiths, short of playing a kazoo. Yet here he is, a youthful 49-year-old, talking about his first ever solo album, T he Messenger , which sees him returning to the big tunes and unmistakable, cascading guitar arpeggios that made him the guitarist of his generation. Reading this on mobile? See the video here We meet in a London photographic studio, where, having his picture taken earlier, Marr still looked unmistakably the bouffant-haired tunesmith whose 1983 Top of the Pops appearance alongside a gladioli-hurling Morrissey provided indie rock with its "year zero" moment. His reputation as one of rock's nicest guys is not without merit, yet he is also savvy and single-minded, and when he agrees to the photographer's request for photographs with a guitar it's with a matey but firm: "Just don't tell me how to hold it." In person, the matt black Keith Richards barnet and glittery nail varnish on his plectrum-holding right hand suggest a man who has spent his entire adult life as a national institution.

Otherwise he's disarmingly normal, self-effacing but not falsely modest, and – mostly – open. But he sounds very much a man on a mission. "I felt something was missing from pop," he explains of The Messenger's prickly energy and epic, romantic soundscapes, which handily coincide with the widely predicted return of the guitar to pop's forefront in 2013. "When you hit it right on guitars in pop, it can be vivacious and exuberant and shiny. I've fond remembrances of bands like Blondie. Without being retro, if I'm really in the mood for it, that's what the guitar is for me. If people say parts of the record sound like the Smiths, I'm OK with that because hopefully it's got the same exuberance." The Messenger doesn't just nod to the Smiths. As he suggests, the wiry post-punk of bands such as Manchester predecessors Buzzcocks and Magazine is a major influence. The title track is electro pop. Marr (who first sang in the Healers, and worked on his vocals in the Cribs), not Morrissey, is singing. But for years, Marr wasn't "OK" with sounding anything like the Smiths.

In fact, as he now admits, the band cast such a long shadow that his musical shapeshifting was an "entirely conscious" decision to avoid sounding like his former self at all. If he came up with a riff that sounded anything like the group, he'd "bin it, flick the Vs up at it". As for the innumerable occasions when other people moaned to him that Johnny Marr didn't sound like, well, Johnny Marr, "No one likes to be dictated to," he insists, combative edge starting to take hold. "If you've been put in a box marked 'jingle jangle indie pop blah blah' then it's your responsibility to break out of that, otherwise you're creatively dead. You might as well write your own tombstone, with diminishing returns." He finishes with a proud, defiant salvo: "Bernard Sumner used to have his head in his hands going 'Everybody's gonna blame me!' When I first played live with Electronic, I came out playing a synthesizer." But by 2005, he had been through so many metamorphoses that he couldn't see himself as a UK artist any more.

So he went to Portland in the US (initially to join Modest Mouse, before hooking up with the relocated Cribs) to "find some space to play". One night, his fingers found the beginnings of the sort of instantly melodious guitar shape he turned out by the truckload when he was the musical half of songwriting partnership Morrissey and Marr. "In the past, I'd have shredded it because it sounded too much like me," he admits, "but it just felt so sweet and so genuine, it seemed important to just go with it." The riff became the Cribs's song We Share the Same Skies , after which he began pining for the way bands operated in the UK, especially in his youth. Reading this on mobile? See the video here "I knew I needed to come back to front a group that operated like that," he explains. "So we all live in Manchester and get together to rehearse a few nights a week even though we don't need to. I just started to act like I was in that group, even though I envisaged a solo record. I didn't want to be in a group where the lead singer didn't want to play guitar any more.

So that meant I was the right man for the job." He sniggers. "Luckily!" Marr denies that he's been stubborn, just single-minded. "It's the prerogative of a young man in his 20s and 30s to be on one," he considers of what seems a partial volte-face, admitting that having been in the Smiths leaves an awful lot of baggage. "But equally, if you're in your 40s and still carrying that around, then you've got a problem." In May 1982, Marr was an 18-year-old clothes shop assistant when he sashayed up to fellow working-class Irish-Mancunian and renowned misfit-about-town Steven Patrick Morrissey to suggest they form a group. The pair of them were so instantly infatuated with each other's possibilities that on their second meeting they planned the Smiths in detail. They plotted the label they would sign to (Rough Trade), the famous record sleeves , even the colour of the label on their debut single (blue). Everything came true. "I didn't expect that. I'd written a load of catchy tunes in my bedroom." Morrissey and Marr onstage during the Smiths 80s heyday.

Photograph: /Paul Slattery While Marr's guitar style and worldview assimilated Motown, Chic, the Hollies and Iggy Pop , Morrissey added words steeped in Oscar Wilde and 1960s kitchen-sink drama. Morrissey's declaration of celibacy was another genius move, which made fans desperate to be the first to love him. "We invented indie as we still know it," says Marr, the debt ceremoniously acknowledged in the 90s when Oasis's Noel Gallagher played Marr's guitar . But the guitarist was equally taken aback by the reach of the Smiths' non-musical impact: the amount of people that turned vegetarian because of Meat is Murder, or became politically motivated through Margaret on the Guillotine. "We were of that generation that came after punk and post-punk," he explains. "We're grateful for the revolution, but there was a bit of homophobia there, and sexism. There wasn't in indie. People don't talk about it now, but it was non-macho. If you were an alternative musician, you were political, because of the times [Thatcherism and the Falklands war]. It was taken for granted that the bands you shared a stage with had the same politics.

I'm not sure you could say that now." So when David Cameron started saying that he loved the Smiths, Marr's old political edge – and sense of mischief – was suddenly revived, and he issued a now famous tweet: " David Cameron, stop saying that you like the Smiths. I forbid you to like it ." It went viral."I got a lot of support," he grins, of what was primarily a joke. "But I didn't realise Twitter was a forum for so many angry people. I'm amazed how many people who should know better were so reactionary towards me. 'Hey Johnny Marr, I'm no Tory but where do you get off on forbidding people liking your music? I bet you won't give Cameron back the £10 he spent on The Queen Is Dead?' What are you talking about?" Marr may have copped flak, but the incident was an early example of how Cameron – an old Etonian who also professes to adore the Jam's coruscating The Eton Rifles – can be light on detail. "I know. I seriously did not like him dropping our name.

He picked the wrong band." Marr was equally taken aback – and thrilled – when at the student protests over the raising of tuition fees, one young woman was photographed standing over riot police in Parliament Square , wearing a Smiths Hatful of Hollow T-shirt, an image that until recently featured on his homepage. "I thought it'd been Photoshopped," he admits. "It took a few minutes to sink in that it was real. But I ended up giving it to everyone then. Clegg; the Queen. I was off!" He chuckles. Marr's amusement turned to surprise when Morrissey joined in the kerfuffle, issuing a statement supporting his ex-bandmate 's tweet about Cameron. It was the first time they had united publicly on anything since the Smiths. However, while Morrissey is something of a dab hand at controversial statements, they didn't discuss it. "We used to, back in the day, for the bedevilment of it." In fact, Marr reveals that while the two former confidantes were meeting up occasionally a few years ago, nowadays they no longer speak at all. "We don't have any reason to, to be honest," he says, with a touch of glumness.

When Marr remastered the Smiths' back catalogue two years ago, he emailed Morrissey (along with all his ex-bandmates) saying he could hear the love in the music, but didn't hear back. "It was a nice way to leave it, I think," he considers, tiptoeing carefully around too much discussion of his former partner. "You can only try and be friendly with someone for so long without getting anything back. You just think: 'Ah, fuck it.'" When Marr started Electronic with Bernard Sumner, Morrissey opined: "He's replaced me. I'm not sure what with." Does Marr think he still feels betrayed? "You never know. I don't have any weirdness about it, or any of them." Marr – whose exit precipitated the split – has long found himself being blamed for the Smiths' demise, calling a meeting after finding himself exhausted through writing the songs, (latterly) producing the records and running the unmanaged group's business affairs.

Some months before, a sign that not all was well with the guitarist (who in those days coped with the pressures by drinking heavily, unlike the teetotal, running-and-white-tea regime he adopts now) came when he drove his car into a wall and was lucky to escape alive. But it has long intrigued me – when he called that meeting, did he know that he'd come out of it a former Smith? "In all honesty, I don't think I did. We just needed a reset, to do things differently. Two weeks' holiday would have been nice." But Marr has no regrets: he's proud that the Smiths did everything at the top of their game. "I'm glad I didn't spend 35 years in the same band. It's just not me." Any lingering notion of the Smiths as a close-knit gang was finally demolished when drummer Mike Joyce sued the two songwriters over royalties. Marr still sees Andy Rourke, a friend since childhood, and the bassist dropped into the studio during recording of The Messenger. But discussion of the Smiths remains off limits.

"If we need to think about what went on in the Smiths then we can torture ourselves by reading those books," he says, referring to the expanding pile of Smiths biographies. There's just one thing that does get Marr's goat – the continual rumours that the Smiths will reform, which he accidentally fuelled himself recently when he joked that he would reunite the band "if the coalition government stood down ". Reading this on mobile. See the video here "Some guy stuck a camera in my face," he explains. "If I don't say something glib, what else is there to say? 'Fuck off!'? It would have saved me a lot of trouble." He suddenly sounds truly weary. "But then that becomes the story."His irritation doesn't last, and he's soon excitedly remembering how watching Bert Jansch work at close quarters convinced him he could be a solo artist, even though he does indeed have a band, who rehearse in Manchester a few nights a week. Just like you know who. Writing songs is very different to how it was with Morrissey – who would add words to a tape of Marr's music and return it, which could often result in a completely different song to how Marr imagined.

"That was a fascinating process." But he's now enjoying "a sense of liberation, being able to call the shots" and sing about his own concerns, whether humanity's relationship with technology or, on the sublime, autobiographical New Town Velocity, the day, aged 15, he "left school for poetry" and tore around Manchester celebrating his first taste of freedom.Around a year ago, Marr included a couple of Smiths songs in a live set at two low-key gigs in Manchester, and was surprised how much he enjoyed playing them. While Morrissey recently announced plans to retire , Marr says he never will. But if he seems happy in his own skin it's because of a union that goes back much further than the Smiths. As a little boy, while others had toy cars or teddy bears, Marr had a toy guitar. "Recently, my parents redecorated the house and there were a couple of my really old toy guitars knocking around. So they moved them out, decorated, then put them back, as if they were houseplants." So when he was recently invited to speak at his kids' school, his wife, Angie, told him not to "terrify" them but to talk about what he knew.

So Marr talked about being a guitarist. "I said: 'If you want to be happy, find something you're good at and make it your life, whether it's being a train driver, architect, or whatever.'" He smiles as he lugs his trusty axe into a waiting car. "There's a lot to be said for being an expert at something." The Smiths | Rolling Stone artists > T > The Smiths > Bio The Smiths Bio The Smiths became one of the most influential bands of all time by mixing the lush guitar matrices of Johnny Marr with the swooning vocals of Morrissey – a sexually ambiguous poet whose cranky yet delicate singing made most other British frontmen of the Eighties seem utterly normal (and boring). Morrissey often appeared in public wearing hearing aid, carried a pocketful of gladioli while performing, and was a magnet for controversy, whether advocating animal rights or trashing the charity supergroup Band-Aid, which he called "diabolical" (he also called the group's album "tuneless" and their leader Bob Geldof "a nauseating character"). None of that would have mattered had the Smiths' meticulous and romantic pop songs not been so strong.

But the band provided a guitar-based alternative to the synth-pop sounds of so many other Eighties UK bands, paving the way for the Nineties Brit-pop explosion, and the Smiths' distinct LPs are still studied by millions of sensitive types all over the world. Born in Manchester and the son of a hospital porter and a librarian, Morrissey first expressed himself by writing; unemployed in the late Seventies, he wrote a book on James Dean and another on the New York Dolls, whose English fan club he headed. He also played briefly in a band called the Nosebleeds. Veteran of such cult groups as Sister Ray and Freaky Party, Marr first met Morrissey at a 1979 Patti Smith concert, and by 1982 they decided to form a band. The pair eventually enlisted drummer Mike Joyce and bassist Andy Rourke for an eponymous debut that, on U.K. indie label Rough Trade (on Sire in the U.S.), entered the British chart at Number Two. An earlier single, "Hand in Glove," was then recorded with Morrissey's favorite female singer, Sixties British pop idol Sandie Shaw, and scored Number 27 in the U.K.

This coup, along with The Smiths' "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" (Number 10 U.K., 1984), established the band. The meteoric rise continued with Meat Is Murder debuting at Number One on the British chart; the group also caused a stir with Morrissey's stage presence, the singer wearing a garland of gladioli in tribute to Oscar Wilde, a hearing aid in homage to Fifties balladeer Johnnie Ray, and a ducktail haircut patterned after English rocker Billy Fury. Some critics sniped that the group's lyrics referred to child molesting, and Morrissey offended others with sharp comments about the all-star Band Aid benefit single for Ethiopian famine relief. His champions, though, hailed his oblique, angst-driven songs as latter-day examples of Ray Davies-styled social commentary. With ex-Aztec Camera guitarist Craig Gannon added, 1986's The Queen Is Dead (Number Two U.K.) fared handsomely, but a disappointing U.S. tour showed that the Smiths had yet to penetrate the American mainstream. Later that year Johnny Marr was involved in a serious car accident; during his recovery, Gannon was fired.

A single, "Sheila Take a Bow," became a Top 10 U.K. hit in mid-1987, but later that year, with Marr deeming their musical approach exhausted, the Smiths disbanded. Strangeways, Here We Come and the live Rank were released posthumously. Despite his prolific output — Viva Hate, Bona Drag, Kill Uncle, Your Arsenal, and Vauxhall and I — Morrissey's solo career hasn't quite matched his success with the Smiths, although the singer has attracted a rabid following in the U.S. He released 1995's Southpaw Grammar (Number 66) and 1997's Maladjusted (Number 61) to an ambivalent critical response. (My Early Burglary Years was a collection of B sides and rarities.) But a tour in 2000 enjoyed sell-out crowds without a new album or even a record deal. In 2004, Morrissey released You Are the Quarry (Number 11), his first solo album in seven years and highest-charting ever, then embarked on a triumphant tour.

Well-received albums followed in 2006 and 2009. Besides playing sessions with Bryan Ferry, Talking Heads, the Pet Shop Boys, and Billy Bragg, Marr served for a while with the Pretenders, The The, and Electronic without ever finding a permanent venue. Marr's low profile led to a reputation as British rock's most talented underachiever. But he reemerged in 2000 for the first time at the front of his own band, the Healers, which included former Dub Pistol keyboardist Lee Spender, bassist Alonza Bevan from Kula Shaker, and drummer Zak Starkey (son of Ringo Starr). Later in the decade Marr continued to act as a guitar mercenary, joining Modest Mouse in 2006. He toured with the band and performed on their Number One album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (2007). In 2008 Marr joined the English band The Cribs and played on their 2009 album, Ignore the Ignorant. Rourke and Joyce played with the Adult Net before backing up Sinead O'Connor; Joyce eventually joined the reformed Buzzcocks.

In 1996 they both sued Marr and Morrissey, complaining over the unequal sharing of Smiths earnings; Rourke settled out of court, but in 1998 Joyce won his case, with a British judge calling Morrissey "devious, truculent, and unreliable." A reunion is not expected. from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001) Gibson ES-355 | The Smiths Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia Edit This guitar was used by lead guitarist Johnny Marr , particularly for early live performances with the band; particularly Top of the Pop appearances. Throughout the early years of The Smiths, the guitar would inexplicably be seen on occasion without the vibrato arm attached to the Bigsby tailpiece. The guitar was originally wired in stereo, although due to technical difficulties at a particular venue, the guitar was rewired. The guitar was purchased second-hand from We Buy Guitars in New York, by Sire Records boss Seymour Stein for Marr. The guitar remains in Johnny's possession, although with wear and tear.

1959 ES-355 (Black) This unit is a custom unit with special options including - a black finish, bound F-holes and a lower horn switch. The guitar was reportedly used in the production of The Queen Is Dead . 60s-70s ES-355 (Walnut) Edit This guitar was used live during the Smiths' American tour, only on 22nd September 1985 at the Magnum Leisure Centre and 28th September at a Clickmin Center soundcheck. The guitar appeared earlier for a split second between Marr and Andy Rourke in the music video for The Boy With The Thorn In His Side . Sean O'Hagan on The Smiths | Music | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Twenty-five years ago this month, a bequiffed 18-year-old called Johnny Maher turned up unannounced at the door of 384 King's Road, a nondescript terraced house in Stretford, Manchester. 'It was a sunny day, about one o'clock,' he recalled years later. 'There was no advance phone call or anything.

I just knocked and he opened the door.' 'He' was Steven Patrick Morrissey, then a 23-year-old misfit who inhabited the fringes of Manchester's fragmentary postpunk music scene. Morrissey had already tried his hand at being a writer, sending live rock reviews to Record Mirror, penning non-fiction books for a small publisher, Babylon Books, (a homage to James Dean, a tract on his favourite group, the New York Dolls) and even sending unsolicited scripts for episodes of Coronation Street to Granada Television. His fitful attempts at rock stardom had been even less successful, and had all but petered out following a few eccentric appearances as the lead singer for a little-known local group, the Nosebleeds.

Back then, Morrissey's effortless oddness was such that Manchester scene-maker and head of Factory Records, Tony Wilson, would later remark: 'Anyone less likely to be a pop star from that scene was unimaginable.' Prior to that fateful day in May 1982, Morrissey and Maher had met only once, their paths crossing fleetingly at a Patti Smith concert at Manchester's Apollo Theatre in 1978, where they had exchanged the briefest of courtesies. Against all the odds, though, the mercurial Morrissey invited the nervous Maher up to his bedroom, where a pair of cardboard cutouts - one of James Dean, the other of Elvis Presley - stood sentinel like twin arbiters of their owner's pop dreams. There, the two music-obsessed strangers talked for hours about their shared influences, among them the New York Dolls, Patti Smith and Sixties girl groups. 'It was pretty phenomenal that we were so in sync because the influences that we had individually were so obscure,' Maher said later, long after he had changed his surname to Marr. 'It was like lightning fucking bolts to the two of us.

This wasn't stuff we liked, this was stuff we lived for really.' A few days later, Morrissey made the return journey to Marr's rented room in Bowdon, where, over a melody lifted from Patti Smith's 'Kimberly', they mapped out the contours of a song called 'The Hand that Rocks the Cradle', a complex lyric about childhood innocence and terror that would soon be set to a chiming, circular guitar line. Though they had yet to name themselves, and yet to find a rhythm section, 'The Hand that Rocks the Cradle' was the first real Smiths song, the inspired starting point of a creative partnership that would last a mere five years and yet alter the arc of British pop music in a way that could hardly have been foreseen by even the most blinkered champion of skinny white-boy indie guitar rock.

Between 1982 and 1987, the Smiths, now comprising Morrissey, Marr, Andy Rourke (bass) and Mike Joyce (drums), released a brace of brilliant singles, at least two classic rock albums, provoked several outbursts of outrage from Britain's self-appointed moral guardians and stirred scenes of fan hysteria on a scale not seen since the heyday of glam rock a decade previously. Perhaps more importantly, though, the Smiths almost single-handedly reclaimed and revitalised the ailing tradition of the guitar-driven, four-piece rock group. To put the extent of their achievement into context, you need only remember that they arrived at a time in the early-to-mid Eighties when punk's rupture had long been papered over, when the new synthesised pop of Boy George and Wham! ruled the charts, and, more importantly, when sample-based dance music first began crossing into the mainstream and rock music seemed to be fighting a desperate rearguard action.

In the office of the NME, where I worked in the mid-Eighties, the split between the dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists of the indie brigade and the unruly iconoclasts of the dance faction threatened to tear the paper apart. Back then, every editorial meeting was a battle ground, every choice of cover star a victory or a defeat. I remember assistant editor Danny Kelly, now a sports presenter, storming out of a meeting, incensed that the Fall had been overlooked in favour of the original ganster rapper Schooly D. Another meeting ended moments from an actual fist fight. I was on the side of the modernisers, fired up by the sheer energy and iconoclasm of hip hop, the sonic dissonance and radical politics of Public Enemy, the lyrical brilliance of Rakim, the inspired cut-and-paste techniques of every great rap single released on Def Jam and Sleeping Bag and all the myriad local labels that sprang up to disseminate this new music. Ironically, the flowering of hip hop reminded me of the eruption of punk: the same energy, the same DIY application, the same sense of possibility that anyone with imagination could cut a single.

The parallels were lost on the indie brigade, though, and on the core readership of the NME, who were, and remain, essentially conservative: in thrall to the familiar - young men with guitars and adolescent neuroses. For the indie boys, the Smiths arrived at the very last minute and saved the day. No other group carried such a weight of expectation - and tradition - as the Smiths. Had they not risen to the occasion, it is not overstating the case to say that the entire trajectory of recent British rock music as we now know it - that's the line from the Smiths to the Stone Roses to Oasis and on to the Libertines and today's indie darlings, Arctic Monkeys - would not have been traced. It took me several years, and a long detox from the music press, to approach the Smiths with any degree of open-mindedness, having finally and reluctantly bowed to their brilliance with the release of the towering 'How Soon is Now', a song, interestingly, that sounds least like a typical Smiths song. I realised that Morrissey's singing voice, which improved enormously between the first and second albums, was an instrument that could be negotiated after all. Then there were the songs!

'If you look at the Smiths' greatest songs over that short five-year period, it's such an intense outburst of creativity that it sweeps all before it,' says the music writer and pop cultural historian, Jon Savage. 'Johnny had this incredibly instinctive melodic gift for a lead guitarist, and a style that was almost a signature from the moment you heard it. Morrissey was doing extraordinary things with lyric and metre, using words that didn't seem to scan on the line in any regular way, using implied rhymes, and often dealing with subject matter that didn't seem to belong in the pop tradition.' Savage cites the Smiths' 1985 single, 'Shakespeare's Sister' as a case in point. 'I listened to it recently,' he continues, 'and was struck again by what a very odd song it is. It's essentially a suicide drama set to a demented rock'n'roll rhythm. I mean, how did that become a hit?

It's not your regular pop song, is it?' Though not blessed with great production, 'Shakespeare's Sister' is nevertheless emblematic of the Smiths' otherness, their singular ability to juxtapose the musically familiar and the lyrically surreal to create something unique. Musically the song evokes an older, more raw rock era, with echoes of both Bo Diddley and the early Rolling Stones in its galloping rhythm. Lyrically, though, it draws on an incredible variety of sources, none of which would have impinged on the consciousness of a less erudite, or indeed eccentric, songwriter. The title comes from Virginia Woolf's essay, A Room of One's Own, one of the many feminist texts Morrissey embraced as a sexually confused, politically awakened adolescent. As Simon Goddard points out in his concise and consistently illuminating track-by-track study, The Smiths: Songs that Saved Your Life, 'Shakespeare's Sister' also pays lyrical homage to Elizabeth Smart's autobiographical novella of obsessive love, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

There are nods, too, to an obscure and melodramatic song about teen suicide called 'Don't Jump', recorded as a B-side by the British pop idol Billy Fury back in the early Sixties. The merging of highbrow and lowbrow influences soon became a Morrissey signature of sorts. 'Reel Around the Fountain', for instance, references Molly Haskell's feminist-fuelled book of film criticism, From Reverence to Rape, while the quintessential Morrissey line, 'I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice', turns out to be lifted, word for word, from Shelagh Delaney's great kitchen sink drama, A Taste of Honey, perhaps the single most quoted source in the Smiths' canon. ('Hand in Glove', 'This Charming Man' and 'This Night Has Opened My Eyes', all borrow from Salford-born Delaney's seminal drama of northern working-class life.) Little wonder, then, that the Smiths were manna from heaven for bedroom adolescents, for whom Morrissey was nothing less than a mirror - and a vindication - of their thwarted dreams and desires.

His hybrid aesthetic - part high camp, part English eccentric, part pop-cultural pick and mix, part Mancunian drollery - extended to the Smiths' record sleeves as well. He alone choose the portraits that adorned the covers, canonising his personal icons for a generation of fans, many of whom discovered a whole world of literature, film and songs made in the postwar, pre-Beatles era that Morrisey seemed most fixated on. Those icons included actors, Alain Delon, Jean Marais, Rita Tushingham and Terence Stamp who, despite Morrissey once defining his idea of happiness as 'being Terence Stamp', famously demanded the withdrawal of his image from the sleeve of 'What Difference Does it Make?' More revealing still, for a confessed celibate, was Morrissey's choice of gay icons such as Joe Dallesandro and Candy Darling, both from the Warhol 'family', the latter immortalised by Lou Reed on 'Walk on the Wild Side'.

More irreverently, but just as knowingly, he selected various lesser-known English 'faces', including the ill-starred Sixties pools winner and author of Spend, Spend, Spend, Viv Nicholson, as well as two stalwarts of British television drama, Yootha Joyce (from Man About the House) and Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street). For all the passing nods to Warhol, and despite Morrissey's undiminished love for the New York Dolls, the Smiths were a quintessentially English proposition, often unapologetically parochial in their obsessions. 'Manchester, so much to answer for,' sang Morrissey on 'Suffer Little Children', but Manchester made the Smiths, and they invoked it time and time again in song. With Marr as his musical director, Morrisey elevated a certain kind of poetic provincialism - the provincialism of Philip Larkin or Alan Bennett - to a pop art form.

In doing so, as the writer Will Self, a longtime Smiths fan, points out: 'Morrissey freed himself to be a national artist in a way that a London pop star could never be.' Morrissey's wilfully maudlin lyricism and his definably northern singing voice, alongside his fondness for a certain kind of camp, self-deflating couplet - 'And, as I climb into an empty bed/ Oh well, enough said' - also spoke of a tradition that predated the pop lineage they were obviously a part of, a lineage that stretched back from the more melodic side of the Jam to early Bowie, and beyond that to the Beatles and the Kinks. 'There's a proscenium arch around the Smiths,' elabaorates Self, 'a music hall element that comes mainly from Morrissey's songs and attitude. You could imagine them in another not too distant time being introduced on The Good Old Days by a man in a dickie bow with a mallet.

That's the tap root of many Smiths songs rather than, say, the great folk or blues tradition that a similar-sounding American rock group would be duty bound to draw on.' The Smiths had a dark side, though, and that too was somehow quintessentially English. 'Morrissey sings of England, and something black, absurd and hateful at its heart,' mused Tony Parsons much later, referring specifically to the singer's more provocative, some would say nationalistic, solo songs. Listening again to the Smiths' first album, though, I am intrigued and appalled all over again by the subject matter of the chilling final track, 'Suffer Little Children'. This is Morrissey's ode to the child victims of the Moors Murderers, which Simon Goddard rightly describes as 'dreadful yet captivating'. It is hard to know what to make of the song save for the underlying sense that Morrissey is working something out for himself, and for his hometown, Manchester, in singing it. Whether or not you think it is suitable subject matter for a pop song at all depends on how seriously you take Morrissey as a songwriter, as an artist. Savage argues in his favour.

'It's an incredibly sensitive subject and one that I almost feel he was compelled to confront. I mean, it was such a stain on the city, it was as if the Sixties ended right then and there in Manchester. Morrissey grew up in the shadow cast by Brady and Hindley, and there's perhaps an unhealthy morbid fascination there, but there's also the sense of an artist wanting to get to grips with the dark side of his city. Whatever the impulse was, it was not shallow nor merely provocative.' The writer Michael Bracewell, in his book England is Mine, homes in on Morrissey's fascination with the underbelly of a reimagined England familiar from the novels of Graham Greene, a not too distant, but fast-fading, urban Albion populated by underworld spivs, rent boys and juvenile delinquents, a land of 'jumped-up pantry boys' and tutu-wearing vicars. Morrissey, like Greene, is drawn again and again to the seedy and the sordid, the louche and the low-rent, seems spellbound by the sight of 'loafing oafs in all-night chemists'.

Writing in 1936, Greene observed that 'seediness has a very deep appeal: it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost'. For better or worse, no other songwriter has captured that sense of a lost England, Arcadian yet besmirched, quite like Morrrisey. Now, ironically, the Smiths also represent something lost in British pop culture, their premature and messy break-up - the result of Morrissey's self-defeating control freakery as much as anything - has left a hole in the pop landscape that has not been filled by the altogether more obvious noise of the Britpop brigade or the rock-by-rote thrust of the current wave of traditional British guitar bands. You could even argue that, for all their skill and fire, their otherness and eccentricity, the Smiths did turn the pop clock back, ushered in the formal conservatism that was to follow.

'Who would have thought,' as Will Self puts it, 'that over 20 years after the Smiths' demise we would be listening to so much music that, in the main, is simply an atrophied form of the Smith's rock classicism?' In fairness the Smiths cannot be blamed for the sins of their imitators. But, what, exactly, is their legacy? The songs, of course, and the craft that carries them. The merging of lyric and melody that seems to have come about so effortlessly time and time again. The sense of possibility that their best songs contain, the possibility that a 'simple' pop song could be as potent and as intimate, as literate and as allusive, as any other kind of great writing. You can hear that same sense of possibility in the lyrics of Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, another writer who deals in the poetry of the parochial, who paints from a quintessentially English - indeed definably northern - palette. You can hear traces, too, in the half-arsed songs that the Libertines left behind, though it is more a striving after something Smithsonian than a finished elucidation of it.

Luke Pritchard, of Brighton band the Kooks, hears echoes of the band everywhere: 'Now that their music has had 20 years to marinate, their influence is more obvious than ever. Everyone from the Kaiser Chiefs to the Killers owes them a huge debt'. 'Morrissey was speaking directly to me,' Brandon Lee, the Killers' lead singer, said recently of the first time he heard the Smiths' 'Panic' on the radio in the early Nineties. That same epiphany he describes occurred across Britain and beyond in the early Eighties, when Morrissey became the bedroom bard to beat them all, the quintessential lonely adolescent turned pop star. In the greatest Smiths songs, you can hear how the great Mancunian misfit, the self-dramatised 'boy with the thorn in his side', fixated on James Dean and the New York Dolls, turned all his acutely perceived limitations into the most potent delineation of outsiderdom and perversity yet articulated by a British pop singer. Now Morrissey resides on the west coast of America; a more unlikely home for 'a jumped-up pantry boy' it would be hard to imagine.

Exiled in Los Angeles, his wilfully adolescent self-absortion has become a tired trope throughout an erratic solo career: narcissim in the young is forgiveable; in the old it is simply ugly. Johnny Marr , too, has been only fitfully successful on his own, though his current collaboration with Modest Mouse took him into the American charts - a success that must surely have caused his former partner some chagrin. You cannot help feeling, however, that, in the manner of Lennon and McCartney, or Strummer and Jones, each needed the other to shine most brightly. Now the moment is long past, the legacy assured, and this Johnny-come-lately fan can certainly live happily without a Smiths reunion. You wonder, though, whether, self-exiled in his mansion in California, the least likely pop star imaginable ever counts his blessings that a shy teenager called Johnny Maher plucked up the courage to knock on the door of his terraced house in Stretford 25 years ago. He really should. And so, heaven knows, should we. Charming men: star appreciations Bono: '"Girlfriend in a Coma" - when I heard it I nearly crashed my car and ended up in a coma.

He has that gift. That is not the work of a miserable man.' Chrissie Hynde: 'The amount of times people have said it was "Meat is Murder" that converted them is astonishing.' Noel Gallagher: 'Whatever you put down in a lyric to define your love or hate, [Morrissey]'ll do it one better.' JK Rowling: 'I think the Smiths were the only group whose falling apart really affected me personally. Very sad.' Billy Bragg: 'He sang all those old Smiths songs and made me feel 17 again. It was pretty amazing as I was 26 at the time.' Observer critic Miranda Sawyer: 'If you notice, it's really all blokes. Men are in love with him... not women.' Gordon Agar

Question: Who was the lead guitarist with The Smiths
Answer: Johnny Marr